


interlude

by thekatriarch



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Trip to Bespin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-17 06:53:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21050141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekatriarch/pseuds/thekatriarch
Summary: A companion piece to my story "Darkness Yielding," just fleshing out some more of what happened on the trip to Bespin, and getting some of Han's perspective for a change.Can be read on its own without reading "Darkness Yielding" first.





	1. Han

**Author's Note:**

> I warned for rape but really it's just a couple of references to having been threatened with it in the past, just trying to cover my bases.
> 
> No sex in this, you want sex you gotta read the long one.

She was a mysterious animal, the princess. He couldn’t quite figure her out, and he knew he should probably stop trying, but he couldn’t, not yet. Maybe this little stretch of time was his last chance, anyway.

She _ had _ let him kiss her, though; she had wanted him to kiss her. Han didn’t go around kissing girls who didn’t want him to kiss them, but then again, he didn’t actually meet that many girls who didn’t want him to kiss them, at least not at first. Later on, when they got to know him, they sometimes (usually) changed their minds. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the princess knew him too well.

Actually, since Yavin, girls had been pretty much throwing themselves at him, and at Luke. Guys too, sometimes, but mostly girls. For the first time in his life, Han had found himself politely declining sex, because he was too hung up on this one girl, who didn’t even like him, but he was holding out hope anyway. If word got around he was sleeping with all the other women in the Rebel Alliance, that would be the final nail in the coffin of the relationship he didn’t have with her.

She _ did _ like him. He was pretty sure. He’d caught her looking at him every now and then, when she thought he wasn’t paying attention to her, but he was always paying at least a little attention to her, so he noticed. He’d seen the dreamy little half smile on her face, and he knew what that expression meant. And when he teased her, when she was in a good mood, she laughed and teased him back. Of course, other times she got really angry and yelled at him, and he yelled back at her, because what the hell was her problem, anyway? Hadn’t he made it clear how he felt about her? Wasn’t it obvious? Would he ever have stuck around, joined the damn Rebel Alliance, for any reason but her?

Of course that’s not what she would have wanted. Sometimes he thought the only thing she cared about was the rebellion. Probably it was.

“You shouldn’t be chasing after girls half your age anyway,” Chewie had told him, two years ago. “She’s a kid, man, leave her alone.”

“She’s not a kid, and she’s not _ half my age, _ and I’m not chasing after her,” he objected.

“How old is she? Twenty? She’s young, and she has no family now. You saw what happened to Alderaan. Big asteroid field now. You should leave her alone. She doesn’t need a guy like you bothering her.”

“Maybe that’s just what she does need,” said Han. “And what do you mean, ‘a guy like’ me?”

“She’s a good girl,” said Chewie.

“Can it, Chewie, she’s not some delicate flower. I’ve seen her take out a dozen stormtroopers on her own, and so have you.”

That was what was so confounding about her. Han was a survivor; had spent his whole life around other survivors, and Leia was as tough as anyone he’d ever met.

She was tough as hell, really; it had taken Han a while to be able to appreciate how tough she really was, the kind of strength it must have taken for her to be able to watch Alderaan’s destruction and still keep moving. Chewie had to knock some sense into him about it. “I couldn’t get out of bed if I saw something like that,” said Chewie. “But we come to her cell and she’s fighting, shooting. We didn’t rescue her. We opened the door, we brought the ship, but she saved herself.”

Chewie was very protective of the princess. Somebody had to be, said Chewie, because she cared more about the rebellion than she did about herself, and since her parents were gone, she needed someone to take care of her. Chewie had been a family man once, before the Empire tore that family apart, and so he’d unofficially appointed himself her surrogate father. Han suspected that Chewie had done the same for him, claims about a “life debt” notwithstanding. Chewie looked intimidating, but he was the biggest softy in the galaxy.

And he was right. Leia did care about the rebellion more than she cared about herself, and she didn’t take care of herself the way she ought to, which is why Han had to drag her out of Echo practically kicking and screaming. Everyone else from High Command was on a transport by then, halfway gone, and there’s Leia, still giving orders while the ceiling was caving in and stormtroopers were breaching the doors, because if anyone was still on the surface, she thought she should be there, too.

That was Leia. Made of steel, or so it seemed. But then there was the other side of her. She had nightmares, he knew that. He’d heard her crying softly in her sleep before, and wondered if he should wake her up, but he didn’t think she’d want him to. Luke woke her up sometimes, and she always seemed faintly embarrassed by it.

And she was so skittish, every time he tried to get close to her. She shouldn’t have to be so strong, he thought. She should let someone take care of her once in a while. Should let _ him _ take care of her. But every time he tried to get close, she froze up. And when he had finally kissed her, like he’d been waiting three years to do, she’d melted into his arms and then run away at the first opportunity.

But then she’d kissed him again. Not on the mouth, not a real kiss, not a prelude to more kiss, just a quick little kiss on the side of his face and she’d said _you do have your moments_ and her voice was very soft and warm, and he knew that was _thank you._

He wasn’t sure where she was now. Sleeping, maybe. He knew she’d been really scared. Hell, _ he’d _ been scared. They’d come very, very close to being caught, and it wasn’t a quick death on the other side; it would have been something much worse. Something she knew a lot more about than he did.

He didn’t know what she’d gone through on the Death Star three years ago, not really; he knew she’d watched her home get blown to nothingness, and she’d probably been tortured, because that was how the Empire did things, and then of course she’d swum through garbage and watched the old man get murdered and then almost died again on Yavin, and had to put up with Han being — he could admit it now — a jackass.

He wasn’t exactly sure when he’d started to fall for her. Maybe when she hugged him after Luke destroyed the Death Star, maybe how she was smiling and laughing and how she’d told him that she knew there was more to him than money, which couldn’t be true, because he hadn’t known it himself.

No, it was even before that, or he wouldn’t have come back in the first place.

Chewie came back into the cockpit. “Not too bad,” he said.

“‘Not too bad’ nothing, Chewie, I’m a genius.”

“Yeah, a genius. Now we’re stranded in the middle of nowhere, what now?”

“I think we can make it to Bespin. Lando’s.”

“Lando’s?” echoed Chewie. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Han. “You have a better one? We have the fuel.”

“If the power cables aren’t too damaged from the mynocks.”

“Hey, the princess had a good point back there, you know. Why the hell is my ship falling apart when we were supposedly leaving any day?”

Chewie waved him off. “Give me a break, man, you were the one who kept saying we needed to do this, do that. She’s a finicky beast, you know. You got everything wired into each other in very unusual ways."

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He patted the front console of the ship lovingly. “Anyway, we better figure out how this is going to work. Someone’s gotta keep an eye on things, make sure we don’t drift off course, make sure there’s no, you know, critical power failures. I guess we take turns.”

“Just you and me? You should let her take a turn, too. She likes to have something to do.”

“I don’t know that watching the helm counts as something to do, but yeah, I guess that’s fine. She can’t do any harm I guess.”

“We could wake the droid up,” said Chewie. “He could take a turn, too.”

“Absolutely not,” said Han. “He was talking about surrendering. He’s not watching my ship. I think we should just leave him switched off a while. Maybe forever. He wasn’t any help with the hyperdrive, was he?”

“He’s doing his best,” said Chewie. “It’s not his fault he’s so annoying.”

“At least tell me the water recycler isn’t broken,” said Han, “or we’re in real trouble.”

“It’s working fine,” said Chewie. “Losing about two, maybe three percent.”

“Two or three percent adds up, Chewie. There’s three of us here, and you start smelling really bad if you’re not showering every day.”

“I can’t work miracles. No such thing as a zero loss recycler and you know it. Three percent is damn good.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“Eight hours each,” said Chewie. “I’ll go first. That’s eight hours in the cockpit, eight hours to sleep, eight hours for everything else.”

“Everything else,” said Han. “What everything else?” 

“Go get some rest,” said Chewie. “You need it.”

He left the cockpit but he didn’t go to get some rest in his own quarters. Instead he wandered back toward the crew quarters, where he was pretty sure Leia was.

She was there, lying rigid on the bunk where she usually slept, making a strange sort of keening sound very quietly. He frowned. She must be having another of her bad dreams. Should he wake her up? The sound she was making was really frightening, like she was trying to scream but couldn’t quite. Then, suddenly, she rolled over and let out a little sob, or maybe it was a laugh, and he was pretty sure she was awake now, and he should probably just leave before she noticed him, but instead he asked, “you okay?”

Well, he’d made her angry again. “How long have you been there?” she said, she practically snarled it at him, turning away so he couldn’t see her face.

“Not long,” he said. He pushed down a little bit of his own anger. He was trying to be _ nice, _ goddammit. “Bad dream? You have those a lot, huh?” He tried to keep himself calm. I don’t want to hurt you, he thought. Let me take care of you, let me help you.

She just asked him to leave her alone, so he did, reluctantly. This was his last chance, and he was going to do it right, if it killed him.


	2. Han

“Quit moping,” said Chewie.

“Who's moping?”

“It’s a long way to Lando’s, I don’t want to spend the whole time watching you moon over her.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Always the same thing with you. You fall for a girl, but you don’t tell her how you feel. You just run around being a nuisance hoping she’ll figure it out, and she never does. For once in your life, just be an adult and _ tell her how you feel about her.” _

Han shifted around in his seat. “I have.”

Chewie snorted. “No you haven’t. I don’t know how you humans waste so much time. Your lives are so short, and you spend so much of it trying to talk yourselves out of what you want. Her, too. Same problem. Tell her, see what she says. Better to know.”

“Yeah, okay, thanks Dad,” he said sarcastically. “I’ll think it over.” He sighed. “You don’t think she knows? I mean, you don’t think it’s obvious?”

“Sorry I brought it up,” grumbled Chewie.

He had told her, though. Hadn’t he? _ You’re the first princess I ever met, it’s a little intimidating. _ That was the most vulnerable thing he’d said to another person in his entire adult life. There was no way she could mistake that for anything but what it was. 

And then: _ If someone is going to kiss me, I want it to mean something. _ So maybe she didn't know, or hadn't known, anyway. But how could she not?

Sure, because she wasn’t a smuggler or a mercenary or a crime lord’s girlfriend, or any of the various unsavory types of women he’d spent time with in his past. According to the Empire, she was a terrorist, but really she was a princess, and maybe she needed to just hear the actual words, the actual words “I love you, I want to be with you,” but still, that was too much to say when he’d only kissed her once, even if he’d loved her for three years.

She was asleep in his quarters now; he’d given them to her, because this was his chance to finally do things right, even if he couldn’t say those words, and he’d given her a shirt to sleep in, so she was in his bed, wearing his clothes, all wrapped up in him, and maybe instead of the bad dreams she usually had, maybe instead she would dream about him. A guy could hope.

He was half-heartedly trying to go through their food supplies when she appeared, sleep-rumpled, rubbing her eyes, cheeks flushed. He couldn’t stop himself from staring at her. All she had on was the shirt he’d given her, which hung down almost to her knees, she was so tiny, and her hair was in a braid that fell over her shoulder, and her cheeks were so pink and she was absolutely the sexiest thing he’d ever seen in his life. He angled himself away from her, hoping she wouldn’t notice his erection.

“Hey, um, hi,” he said, nervous. “Did you sleep okay?”

“Oh,” she said. “Hi.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest like she hadn’t been expecting to see him. “I… sorry. What are you doing?”

He sighed. “I’m trying to see how much food we have, but I’ll be honest, Princess, this isn’t the kind of work I’m best at.”

She laughed. He loved how she sounded when she laughed. “No, Captain, it really isn’t. You should let me do that.”

“Twist my arm,” he said.

“Is there any caf? Please tell me we’re not going to run out of that,” she said.

“You’re an addict, you know,” he said. “Yeah, we should have enough. Chewie doesn’t touch the stuff, just you and me, so.”

She smiled. “It’s just that instant swill though, isn’t it?”

“Honey, I’ll take you to the fanciest caf shop in the galaxy once we’re done with this trip,” he told her, and she blushed and looked away. “I’ll buy you one of those goofy things where they stand there pouring hot water for twenty minutes and it costs you fifty credits and tastes just the same as the regular stuff. I bet Lando’s got some fancy shit like that at his place.”

“At a mining colony?” She sounded skeptical.

“Well it’s kind of a combination of things,” he said. “Half mining colony, half luxury casino.” 

She burst into laughter. “Okay. Sounds fantastic. You been there before?”

“Yeah, once. Lando’s the biggest show off you ever met, had to take us all over when he first got it.”

“And how exactly did he get it?”

“Same way he gets everything. Gambling.”

She shook her head. “Well he seems like a real great guy. Are you even writing stuff down?” she asked. “Have you ever done an inventory before in your life, Solo?” She started laughing, looking for something to write with. “Didn’t you have to do this when you were smuggling? Hang on, get me a data pad or something. I’ll make a spreadsheet.”

A spreadsheet. Damn, she was just the cutest thing. He did his best to stay out of her way, because he knew that if he pushed her even a little, she would retreat again, and he liked her so much like this.

“Okay,” she said. “We start at one end and move through. Systematically. I can’t believe you don’t know how to do this.”

“Good thing you’re here, then,” he said, and he gave her a cup of the instant caf. 

“Thanks,” she said, looking down, with a little smile. “What’s the water situation?”

“Chewie says the recycler’s working about as well as it ever does, we’re losing probably two or three percent.”

“That’s not bad,” she said. “At least something on this ship is working. How long do you think we’re going to be out here?”

He sighed. “Six weeks, if we can make good time and nothing goes wrong. So, six to eight.”

“Eight weeks,” she said, eyes wide. “That’s a long time.” She was fiddling with the end of her long braid. Damn, she was cute. “And not all the water even goes into the recycler, especially if we’re taking showers and stuff, we lose probably another two percent to evaporation, maybe more. We’re going to have to be stingy.” She groaned. “I probably can’t wash my clothes, can I? Maybe once a week. I sure wish I’d brought some extra—” she cut herself off, turning red.

Han studiously avoided looking at her. “You can borrow whatever you need,” he said. “Lucky for you, I hate doing laundry more than I hate buying new clothes.”

She laughed, startled. “I didn’t think you owned a change of clothes, Solo; you always look exactly the same. Anyway, I guess no matter how slovenly we get here, we’ll never smell worse than we did after the trash compactor.”

“There we go,” said Han. “Forever the optimist, aren’t you, Princess?”

They sat there on the floor for the next two hours. Han counted the packets of food while the princess entered them into her spreadsheet, frowning. Having a job to do was helpful to keep him from just staring at her bare legs, which he’d never really seen before, other than an occasional glimpse when she was dressed up nice. Leia occasionally wore dresses, usually when he was ferrying her to some diplomatic meeting where she needed to impress some muckety-muck and try to convince them to support the rebellion, financially or otherwise. Those were always dangerous missions; even more dangerous than when they went to outright sketchy places like Ord Mantell. All it would take was for some nervous person to alert the Empire that Leia was coming, and they’d have carted her off to some bleak cell somewhere to be executed.

He didn’t know how she did it, but she always got what she needed. She had a real way with people. Sometimes that made Han feel a little better about how quickly and completely he’d rearranged his entire life after meeting her. He’d really had no intentions of coming back to Yavin, and afterward he’d had no intentions to stick around. Instead he’d joined the rebellion full time, and it hadn’t taken him long at all to become a true believer, and it was mostly because of her. But everyone reacted that way to her. She was special. Han wasn’t special, not special enough for her, and he knew it, but he wanted her anyway, and if he knew how to become the kind of man she deserved, he would have done it, but he didn’t. He was working on it, though.

And he still had that death mark hanging over his head. Their last trip to Ord Mantell had shaken him up pretty badly. Not just because that bounty hunter had found him; that had happened before, and he always got out of it. But Leia had been with him. She could have gotten hurt, or killed, or the bounty hunter might have decided to bring her along and sell her, either to Jabba or to one of the many slave traders on Tatooine who did a good business in beautiful girls. And that was something he couldn’t live with.


	3. Leia

Six to eight weeks. Six to eight weeks. She kept running the words over and over in her mind. How was she going to make it six to eight weeks here, with Han, on Han’s ship, wearing Han’s clothes, sleeping in Han’s bed, not to mention everything _ else _ she was doing in Han’s bed, half crazed with how much she wanted him to come into the cabin and just take what he wanted from her. There was a lock on the door, but she had stopped locking it. Come in, come in, come _ in, _ she thought, even though she knew that if he did come in, she would tell him to leave.

She was being ridiculous, wandering around the ship with next to nothing on. Just his shirt, her legs bare. She shouldn’t do that. Like she was daring him to do something about it. He didn’t do anything about it, though, which was infuriating, and a relief. He would look at her, and there would be a strange expression on his face, and she wondered what he was thinking about when he looked at her like that, but then again, there was probably only one thing a guy like him thought about when he looked at a girl like her.

“Where did you get all this tea, anyway?” she asked. They were sitting together at the table in the main cabin. “Since when do you even drink it?”

“I don’t,” he said, “but you do. And you’re here a lot.”

“But you were leaving,” she said. She couldn’t stop reminding him that he was leaving, maybe because she needed to remind herself that he was leaving, because otherwise she might do something really stupid.

He shrugged. “Call it wishful thinking.”

Wishful thinking? What the hell did that mean? She looked down at her cup and didn’t say anything. “Okay, but where did you _ get _ it?”

“I can get anything, you know that.” He grinned at her. “That’s what I do.”

“Is there a big black market for Gatalanten tea?” she asked, skeptically.

“When there’s a war on? There’s a black market for everything, Princess. You’d be surprised.”

“I guess I would,” she said. “I never really had to think about it until recently. What do you mean, wishful thinking?”

He didn’t look at her, cagey. “Well like I said before. It’s not like I _ want _ to leave.”

She felt something warm opening in her chest. “So why are you?”

“You know why, Leia.” He had started calling her Leia more and more often. She liked it, but she also hated it. Like everything else he did. “That bounty hunter finally knocked some sense into me, I guess. I gotta pay off Jabba the Hutt or that’s just going to keep happening. It was one thing when it was just my own ass on the line, but now…”

“Now what?” She studied his face. He seemed thoughtful. 

“You know anything about Jabba the Hutt?” he asked her.

She didn’t, not really. “I know who the Hutts are,” she said, “but not a lot more than that.”

He shook his head. “What about Tatooine? Know much about that place?”

“Just what Luke’s told me,” she said.

“Yeah, Luke doesn’t know shit about the real Tatooine; the Hutt Tatooine. When I met him, he was walking around Mos Eisley with his eyes as big as dinner plates. Kenobi left him alone for about ten seconds to talk to Chewie and he almost got himself killed. It’s a rough place. Your old man must have been pretty desperate to send _ you _ there. Desperate or stupid.”

“It was important,” she said, inadequately. 

“Yeah,” said Han, very gently. “I know it was, sweetheart.”

“So what’s your point?” she asked, blushing a little. Three years ago, his “sweetheart”s had started out sarcastic and rude but lately they’d become softer, kinder. Like he meant it.

“So my point is, Tatooine’s a slave planet, and there’s good money in it, especially for… someone like you.”

“Oh,” she said, and hesitated for a minute. “What do you mean, someone like me?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean,” he said. “Somebody beautiful and young. And, you know, aristocratic. They wouldn’t have a girl like you mining salt or cleaning houses.”

“Oh,” she said again. Back on Vader’s star destroyer, on the way to the Death Star, a couple of stormtroopers had threatened to do that to her, but it was just talk. They wouldn’t have actually dared. They were too afraid of Vader to do anything they hadn’t specifically been told to do.

“So you think I’m beautiful?” she said, raising her eyebrows. Han rolled his eyes.

“You know you’re beautiful. Don’t play dumb, it doesn’t suit you.”

She looked away, smiling. “So, what, you were going to leave me for my own good?”

“There’s a difference between leaving,” he said, “and leaving _ you.” _ And then he kissed her again, and she felt tears in her eyes, so she kissed him harder, because if she pulled away, he would see her tears, and that was the worst thing she could imagine right now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Sophie Hannah and her poem "Leaving and Leaving You" for giving me the ending to this chapter and also just generally making me cry whenever I read it: "You were all of the reasons I thought of staying / And none of the reasons why I went."


	4. Han

She retreated again, like she usually did. Well, they had nothing but time. They were two weeks into this trip and there was at least a month to go. After he’d kissed her, she started wearing her own clothes again, which was a little disappointing — he’d gotten so used to the delicious sight of her bare legs — but he couldn’t really blame her. He’d never met anyone who was so scared to fall in love.

Why shouldn’t she be? What did he have to offer a girl like that, anyway? She was right; he was leaving; he’d never stopped saying that he was leaving, not since the first day they met.

And he’d never told her that he wanted to come back. Maybe he should. He wanted to, didn’t he? To free the galaxy and all that jazz? To be with her, if nothing else.

“Hey, can I ask you something?” she said one day. “Why does Jabba the Hutt want you dead? What did you do for him?”

“Nothing that unsavory,” he said. She raised an eyebrow skeptically. “No, really,” he said. “I was just a humble cargo shipper.”

“‘Humble?’” she echoed. “I don’t think that’s a word I’d ever use to describe you, Captain. What kind of cargo?”

“Drugs,” he admitted. “Other stuff too, but that’s what we were moving on that particular job. Hey, I’m not _ proud _ of it,” he added, a little defensively.

“Could be worse,” she said. “I guess you’ve made up for it since then. So what happened?”

“Ah, we got surprised by an Imperial patrol and overreacted a little bit. I thought we might get boarded. It happens once in a while.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Not _ this _ ship, surely.” Teasing him. 

He shrugged. “It happens to everyone, once in a while. If we were just moving stolen goods or something, you can usually get out of that with a bribe, but this stuff… Especially with a Wookiee on board, the Empire loves Wookiees, you know. As slaves.”

“Yeah,” said Leia. “I know. There were some of us in the Senate, mostly Alliance people but not all, we were trying to get that banned. Nothing ever got through the Senate unless the Emperor wanted it to, but we thought maybe… maybe we could at least get a compromise, get the children free.” She blinked her eyes several times, rapidly, like she was trying to stop herself from crying. “I hated the Senate,” she said. “Just sitting around arguing about nothing while the whole world went to shit.” She wiped her eyes, like she was angry at herself for getting emotional.

“Why’d you do it, then?” he asked, curious.

“It was my dad’s idea,” she said. “When he resigned. I was supposed to be, you know, young and innocent and above suspicion, so maybe people wouldn’t notice what he was up to. It worked pretty well for a while, until Scarif. So what happened next?”

“Huh?”

“With the shipment.”

“Oh. Well we dumped the cargo. Didn’t end up getting boarded after all, but it was too late, the stuff was gone. Nobody wants to hire you after something like that, so I had some trouble scraping up the 10k.”

“10k?” she echoed, sitting up a little straighter. “Please don’t tell me we paid you _ ten thousand credits _ for me and the Death Star plans.”

“Twelve,” he said. “And that was a big pay cut. Kenobi promised me seventeen just for getting him to Alderaan. That didn’t work out.” 

She startled; jumped, almost, as if she’d been shocked, and he realized with horror what he’d just said. “Shit, shit, Leia, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said it that way.” What the hell was wrong with him?

“No,” she said. “No, it’s… it’s okay, actually. Really. I’m just not used to hearing… no one ever mentions Alderaan to me. Ever. Like it’s just… like it never existed.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “You never talk about it either. I guess everyone just figures… Do you _ want _ to talk about it?” he asked. 

She fidgeted, looked at the nearly empty cup of tea she’d been drinking. “Nobody wants to listen to that.”

“I do,” he said. “Tell me just one thing.”

“Did you ever go there?” she asked.

“Nah. Not a lot of work for a guy like me in a place like that.”

“Well I’m glad to hear that,” she said primly, and then gave him a playful look and a smile.

“So tell me,” he said.

“Tell you what?” 

“I don’t know, anything. Unless you don’t want to. It just sounded like maybe you did.”

She fell quiet for a moment, thinking, and then she said, “did you ever hear of candlewick flowers?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“They grew wild all over, like by the side of the road, but there were also cultivars,” she said. “We had a whole garden… it’s a climbing vine, they grew up the sides of the walls. They were right outside my bedroom window. They didn’t look like that much during the day, but at night the flowers would open… they’re bioluminescent, they glowed. I used to—” she put her hands up over her mouth and closed her eyes, shaking, a tiny sob coming out from behind her hands.

“Hey,” said Han, and he moved closer to her. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay.” Way to go, Solo, he told himself. You made her cry. Would she let him put an arm around her? There wasn’t any way to find out except to do it, and he sure as hell couldn’t do nothing, so he tried it.

She leaned into him, so he wrapped both arms around her and gently kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry,” he said. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought it up. But maybe it was good for her to let some of this out. Shit, he didn’t know.

“No,” she said, “no, don’t be. _ I’m _ sorry.”

“What the hell are _ you _ sorry for?”

She sniffled. “I don’t know. Being a mess?”

“You mean like, _ having feelings?” _ he asked. “I’ve been told that’s actually normal.”

She started laughing, but the tears were still falling. “Yeah, I’ve heard that, too.” She leaned against him a little more and he held her a little more tightly. “I know they used to call me the ice princess back at Echo, you know,’ she added.

“Nobody called you that,” he said.

“Liar.” She pulled away a little, smiled up at him, wiped her eyes on her sleeve, blinking away the tears.

“Well,” he said, “I did my best to kill that reputation.”

She laughed again. “You sure did. I’m not sure I like _ that _ reputation better, though.”

He pulled her in again and let her rest her head against him. She took a deep breath and let it out with a little sigh. “What was I was going to say was, I used to sit in my window at night, because they were growing up the walls outside my room. There were these little bats that came to drink the nectar in summertime, and you could see them, sort of flickering through the glow, and they sang to each other. It just felt sort of… magical. That probably sounds stupid, right?”

“No,” he said. “It sounds really nice.” 

He was already making a plan. First he’d get them to Lando’s and get the ship fixed, and he’d take her back to the fleet and get her safe, or as safe as Leia ever could be. Then he’d pay off Jabba. Then he was going to scour the damn galaxy until he found someone who had some of these flowers that she loved so much. If they were that common on Alderaan, somebody must have planted some somewhere offworld. And then he’d bring her one, a live one, he’d bring her a whole garden’s worth, and then, maybe, she’d understand.


	5. Leia

She was collecting, in her mind, what she came to think of as “the incidents.” There was the incident on the asteroid, in the cave that wasn’t a cave. There was the incident where he told her that just because he was leaving didn’t mean he was leaving _ her. _ There was the _ who said it didn’t mean anything _ incident and the incident about the candlewick flowers, which maybe didn’t quite qualify as incidents because he hadn’t kissed her either time, but she _ had _cried in front of him, which was awful and vulnerable and terrifying. Crying over flowers. What a stupid thing. 

Then there was the incident in the cockpit, when he’d pulled her into his lap. That time _ she _ had kissed _ him _ first. Things had gotten close to getting out of hand during that incident. She had really almost— almost _ what? _ Almost stopped being the ice princess and been a normal woman who did normal things with a man? After that incident she’d hidden in her cabin — Han’s cabin — and made herself come over and over and over, remembering that firm hardness underneath her, wishing she’d been brave enough to keep going, to find out what happened next.

But he was leaving, he was still leaving, and she couldn’t, she _ couldn’t _ have sex with him if he was going to leave.

Why not, she asked herself. Why not? Anyone else would have. There were always women hovering around Han, and he could have had his pick, but as far as she could tell, he’d never done anything with any of them, which seemed impossible to believe, but she would have heard _ something, _ surely? The only rumors along those lines about Han were the rumors about _ her _ and Han.

She remembered that Amilyn had said that was because Han was in love with Leia, and had been all along, but Leia had never believed her. Han was _ old: _ he was in his _ thirties, _ and she was only twenty-two, so he couldn’t really be interested in her seriously. He just wanted the bragging rights; he wanted to be able to say he’d fucked the ice princess. Right? At least that’s what she’d thought. She was starting to think she’d been wrong.

_ Who said it didn’t mean anything? _

This would be simpler, she thought, if she’d had sex with someone before. It wouldn’t seem like such a big deal, then; she would know what it was like, there wouldn’t be so much pressure for her first time to be _ special, _ like what was _ that? _ She wasn’t sure where the age cutoff was; when it became weird to have not had sex yet, but she was pretty sure that twenty-two was on the wrong side of it. Nineteen would have been okay, if she’d gone ahead and slept with Han the night after the Death Star, that first time he’d just-barely kissed her. That would have been okay, in retrospect, maybe. Except that underneath the excitement of their victory, she had been reeling with fresh trauma and terror; less than 24 hours out from being imprisoned and tortured and witnessing the destruction of Alderaan, so maybe it wouldn’t have been okay. Maybe it would have been terrible. 

It had taken her some time to put herself back together after all that. She probably wasn’t done.

No one but Han ever really even _ tried, _ not since the Death Star. He was the only person who ever flirted with her, even. Everyone else was, what? Intimidated by her? _You’re the first princess I ever met, it’s a little intimidating. _ Or maybe they thought she was too delicate, after everything she’d been through.

Everything she’d been through. What _ had _ she been through? She couldn’t remember much about what had happened on the Death Star anymore. It must have been pretty bad, she thought, or she would remember more of it. She remembered when her ship was boarded, and she remembered being brought before Darth Vader, and the horrible hissing sound of the machine that did his breathing. She remembered seeing Captain Antilles, dead, on the floor, his eyes open and staring at nothing. He had worked for her family for ages, he’d been her father’s right hand in some ways, and there he was, dead and tossed aside like he was nothing. He’d had a family, he’d been a father, and then he was just another discarded corpse under Darth Vader’s feet.

She remembered when they took her onto Vader’s star destroyer; the stormtroopers talking about her like she wasn’t there, speculating about whether she was a virgin and which one of them should get to go first. She’s sure they didn’t actually _ do _ what they were talking about; there would have been evidence, even if she couldn’t remember.

She remembered the cell, and how cold it had been, and she remembered that there had been pain — there’s evidence of that etched in her skin — but that was just about it. Just a big blank emptiness from the time she arrived until Luke suddenly appeared in the doorway. _ I’m here to rescue you. _

She knew that she’d seen Alderaan explode, but she couldn’t _ remember _ it, not really. She didn’t need to, though, because she saw it happen every night in her dreams.

In the cockpit, when she arrived to take her turn at the helm, Han turned to her with a little smile. “Hey, you,” he said, his voice warm in a way that sent little shivers down her spine. “Check it out, look.”

“At what?” she peered out into the big nothing full of stars.

“Right there,” he said. “Right where we’re pointed. You see that star? That’s Bespin’s star. Look how much bigger it is than the others.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I guess it is.”

He glanced at her. “Okay, Princess, I thought you’d be more excited than that.”

She sat down, hugging her knees into her chest. What to say? She did want to get off this ship, to take a real shower, to eat some real food. She wanted to find out what had happened to everyone else after the evacuation: who was still alive, who wasn’t. She wanted to know if poor Luke was all right. She wanted to get back in the fight. But she liked whatever was building between the two of them, here, and once this journey ended, so would this. No more stolen kisses, no more incidents, no more quiet talks where he actually told her things that mattered. No more _ him _ at all, because he was leaving. He was still going to leave her.

_ There’s a difference between leaving and leaving _ you.

“So how much farther do you think?” she asked.

“I think we can do it in another week,” he said.

“That’s what you said a week ago,” she said, smiling.

“Hey, when we get there,” he said, “think about it: it’s gonna be great. We can finally eat some real food. I am so sick of the shit we’ve been eating. From now on, I’m only going to stock the gourmet stuff.”

“Liar,” she said. “You know if you at least had a galley in this thing we could doctor that stuff up a little bit.”

“You know how to cook?” he asked skeptically.

“I know how to do a lot of things,” she said.

“You didn’t have people to do that for you? What’s the point of being a princess if you have to do your own cooking?”

She laughed. “Okay, yeah. We had people to do that for us at home. But on Coruscant, my dad and I did most of that stuff for ourselves. For security, you know? People can be bribed or blackmailed, droids can be reprogrammed… safer not to let anyone into our place. Anyway, I liked cooking. It’s relaxing.”

“All right, well, someday you’ll cook me dinner, huh? Or breakfast.”

She blushed, smiling, and looked away. “What someday, Han? You’re leaving.”


	6. Han

_ What someday, Han? You’re leaving. _ Somehow he had started to imagine that what was happening between them here on the ship would continue after they landed. Every day he felt a little closer to her, a little closer to the day that she would admit that this was real, and good, and that it meant something, that it could be something. 

But she was right. He was leaving. How could he ask her to love him, when he couldn’t promise her that he’d stick around?

He would come back, though. He was sure about that now. He’d get Jabba his money and everything would be fine, and then he’d come back to her, with his arms full of those bioluminescent flowers that she loved so much that when he’d said _ tell me something about Alderaan, anything, _ that’s what she’d told him about, and then he’d tell her _ I love you, I’ve always loved you, I’ll never leave again. _

And what would _ she _ say? What if he did all that and she still didn’t want him?

They could see the planet itself now, in the distance, a gas giant, pink and purple. Still small, but getting bigger. Lando’s little kingdom was there somewhere, orbiting in the mid atmosphere. He was starting to have some second thoughts about Lando now that it was far too late to change plans. The last time he and Lando had been in the same room together, things had gotten… tense.

They were almost there. Less than a day, that’s what Chewie said. Chewie had spent most of the trip poking around in the ship’s systems, still trying to figure out what the problem was with the hyperdrive, except when he was lecturing Han.

“You realize you’re not the only two people on this ship,” said Chewie. “It’s been seven weeks of this, the two of you making big moon eyes at each other all the time, and you still haven’t just told her how you feel. I was ready to vent us all into space two weeks ago, I’m so tired of it.”

“All right, all right,” grumbled Han. “What do you expect me to do, Chewie? We’re almost there.”

“Yeah, and you’re going to regret it if you don’t tell her how you feel. We might not make it back from Jabba’s, you know. Been three years; just paying him back might not be enough.”

“We’ll make it back from Jabba’s,” said Han, perfectly confident. “That’s no problem. I’ll… I’ll tell her then.”

“Yeah, right,” said Chewie. “Well, I don’t appreciate having to babysit the two of you all the time.”

“I didn’t ask you to babysit!” Han objected. “She’s the one who—”

“She’s young,” said Chewie. “And she doesn’t know if you’re really serious about her. If you would just—”

“I get it, I get it,” snapped Han. Chewie shook his head and went to take his shift in the cockpit.

Leia appeared a few minutes later, smiled shyly at him, and went to his quarters, which were her quarters now. He watched her go, heart in his throat. _She doesn’t know if you’re really serious about her._

_If someone’s going to kiss me, I want it to mean something._

He drifted after her, leaned his head against the door to the little cabin where she was. Was she going to sleep now? Would she let him in, if he knocked? He stayed there, leaning against the door, for longer than he should have, and then the door opened, and she was standing there, startled, in his shirt which hung down almost to her knees, and she said “oh! What were you—?”

“Nothing,” he said, “I’m sorry.” Great, he thought. Now I look like a creep.

She went up on her tiptoes and kissed his mouth. “Come in,” she said, softly, a little tremor in her voice. He followed her through the doorway, and she lay her head against his chest, so he closed his eyes and enfolded her in his arms, breathing her in.

How was he supposed to walk away from this? He didn’t even know what _ this _ was, only that it was beautiful and it made him feel like he could be a real person; maybe even a _ good _ person, if she would just believe in him, just a little tiny bit, then maybe he could be the man he wanted to be for her.

She felt so small in his arms; small, but not delicate. She was getting too thin, though. She hadn’t been eating enough. None of them had.

She took a deep breath and then said, “we’re almost there.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We are.”

“Will you… will you come lie down with me?” she asked. “Just… just to lie down.”

“Of course,” he said. I’d do anything for you, he thought, whatever you want, just say the word and it’s yours.

He lay down next to her in the bunk. She curled up, her back against his chest, his face in her hair, and he put his arm around her. I love you, he thought. I’m sorry I can’t say it out loud yet, but I love you. I’ll tell you someday, I promise. When I come back.

After a while she rolled over and kissed him again, and they kissed, that’s all, they lay there in the bunk and kissed, and that was enough, that was plenty, because this girl was _ the _ girl, the girl he’d spent three years waiting for and hoping for.

When he finally fell asleep, he had her in his arms, and when he woke up, she was gone.


End file.
